The Shipwreck Starts Here

Abstract

This chapter is a complementary text to the moving image work Il Naufragio Inizia da Qui (2021), which adopts the conceptual lens of a shipwreck state in its critique of the use of repurposed cruise ships to quarantine migrants in the south of Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both video and text start with protests in the seaside town of Amantea, Calabria, where a group of people locked down in an accoglienza center (migrant reception center) contracted COVID-19. The protest had the intention of interning those people onto quarantine vessels. During a period in which solidarity at sea and on land is under assault, the chapter explores how a nationalist imaginary of detention aspires to return those who arrive to seek refuge by boat, under precarious conditions, back to the sea and to the risk of shipwreck once more. Under the auspices of a system of hospitality, the sea becomes a space of floating detention and incarceration (Peters and Turner 2017; Khalili 2021).Historically, the shipwreck has been a metaphor for internal state turmoil (Blumenberg 1985), and the very material price paid for the devastating global processes of oceanic modernity (Mentz 2015). As a device to articulate conditions both at sea and on shore, the chapter reflects on the eco-pedagogical phrase “Il mare inizia da qui” (the sea starts here), through the video’s use of disjunctures of sound and image to produce an immersion in the sea whilst on land and on the land from the position of the sea. These disjunctures allow for a reflection on the ways different actors—asylum seekers and activists challenging detention and bordering practices—perceive their relationship with the sea. In doing so, the central question emerges: Is it also possible to say that from the land “il naufragio inizia da qui”? Or, does the shipwreck start here?.